Petition filed in US Supreme Court to drop the Google trademark, claims Google is a generic word for search

The US Supreme Court has received a petition which seeks removal of Google as a trademark as the petitioners believe that the trademark has become a generic word over the years.

In 2012, Google filed a cybersqautting case against David Elliot and Chris Gillespie under the Uniform Domain Name Registration Policy. The petitioners, in turn, had filed a petition seeking to drop the trademark, since they had 763 domain names with Google as a part of it. One such being googledonaldtrump.com. Google won the case and the petitioners were asked to drop the domain name.

Cybersquatting is a malpractice of using trademarks as a part of their domain name and making a profit out of it at a higher price.

The court’s verdict also said that Google was not merely a search engine, which the petitioners said has become a generic word for search.

According to a report in the Ars Technica, the appeals court had said , “Even if we assume that the public uses the verb ‘google’ in a generic and indiscriminate sense, this tells us nothing about how the public primarily understands itself, irrespective of its grammatical function, with regard to Internet search engines."

The court also stated that trademark loss happens if it makes competition difficult, so much so that without the trademark other competitors cannot go ahead.

The American Trade Bar Association states that trademark gives a company the right to sue for infringement and to avoid confusion between two trademarks .

Meanwhile, the petitioners have now gone to the US court for review.